An Open View

5 Environments For Open, Hybrid Cloud PaaS Solutions using OpenShift

Chances are, you are either just beginning to define your cloud adoption strategy or you're looking to optimize the cloud solution that you currently have in place. Whatever your situation, open hybrid cloud solutions are essential to ensure that you maximize your flexibility and leverage your IT resources in a highly-efficient way.

There is a burgeoning crop of applications and portals for cloud cost optimization and reporting which point to the maturity, complexity and adoption surrounding cloud offerings. This strong adoption of the cloud offerings has sent IT organizations scrambling to understand the costs and to show their savings for, in many cases, well executed transition plans.

Google has an offering titled the Google Compute Engine, or GCE. Google has direct support for “projects” in it’s implementation; any runtime instances require that you first create a project to contain them and any associated resources. This means that this is the primary mechanism for cost reporting and chargeback. Once you enable billing, the usage will be reported based on it’s project.

The task here is to setup an Amazon EC2 instance and run the Ghost blogging application. Basically, I wanted to create this blog, on Amazon EC2 and use my GoDaddy domain name. This will be a two part blog where the first part will be setting up EC2 while the second part will be Amazon Route53 setup using GoDaddy as the registrar. I thought this was going to be an easy setup, however, I thought wrong. The were a few gotchas that really held me up, so I hope this document helps anyone having issues setting up Ghost blogger on EC2. This step by step process will be a document for anyone having this issue or plans to do the same configuration as I.

An AWS cloud environment supports cost allocation using two mechanisms, tagging and linked accounts. Of the two, tagging is by far the most flexible. Tags are key/value pairs which may be applied to most objects created in AWS; exceptions are items which are either not allocated dynamically (such as static-IPs) or inherently shared (such as a load balancer). Tags can be added during the creation of many AWS resources such as EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and EBS volumes via the admin console or AWS CLI. But not all resources can be added at the time of setup for most objects.

The IT environment has certainly changed for organizations in the last eight years, since the time that Amazon.com launched it’s AWS service, and shaped a new virtual landscape. There have been many debates since that point as to what exactly a cloud is.

Red Hat recently delivered a webinar on managing Java Applications in an Open Hybrid Cloud. This webinar is more technically focused around the EAP 6 architecture and also touches on the benefits of an open, hybrid approach to cloud computing.

The consumerization of IT brought on by “Bring Your own Device” (BYOD) policies and the increasing appetite for public cloud services has put great stress on today’s IT organizations. As employees continue to incorporate cloud services such as Dropbox and Evernote into their daily workflow, companies must find new ways to strike a balance between IT security, compliance, and employee productivity.

Once again the freedom of Open Source best enables these organization to find that balance. Through the integration of some of the best of breed Open Source Technologies like ownCloud, OpenShift and Gluster, companies can now safely provide open and flexible access to their data without having to let it roam free in the wild.

Yesterday I made an interactive webcast talking about the process for deploying JBoss Enterprise Middleware using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as part of your cloud strategy. If you would like to watch this presentation you can find it here as well as at the Carahsoft Events page.

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An Open View

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